The Visions of the Sleeping Bard

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{28a} Corruption of the best.--A Welsh adage; v. Myv. Arch. III. 185.

{28b} Some mocking.--Compare Bunyan's Christian starting from the City
of Destruction: "So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the
middle of the plain. The neighbours came out to see him run, and as he
ran, some mocked, others threatened and some cried after him to return."

{29a} Who is content.--Cp.

Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo, quam sibi sortem
Seu ratio dederit seu fors obiecerit, illa
Contentus vivat, laudet diversa sequentes?

--Horace: Sat. I. i.

{34a} Increases his own penalty.--Cp.

--the will
And high permission of all-ruling heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others.

- Par. Lost: I. 211-6.

{36a} Royal blood--referring to the execution of Charles I.

{37a} The Pope and his other son.--The concluding lines of this Vision
were evidently written amidst the rejoicings of the nation at the
victories of Marlborough over the French and of Charles XII. over the
Muscovites

{43a} Glyn Cywarch.--The ancestral home of the Author's father, situate
in a lonely glen about three miles from Harlech.

{43b} Our brother Death.--This idea of the kinship of Death and Sleep is
common to all poets, ancient and modern; cp. the "Consanguineus Leti
Sopor" of Vergil (AEneid: VI. 278); and also:

Oh thou God of Quiet!
Look like thy brother, Death, so still,--so stirless -
For then we are happiest, as it may be, we
Are happiest of all within the realm
Of thy stern, silent, and unawakening twin.

- Byron: Sardanapulus, IV.

{44a} An extensive domain.--Compare what follows with Vergil's
description (Dryden's trans.):

Just in the gate and in the jaws of Hell,
Revengeful cares and sullen sorrows dwell,
And pale diseases and repining age -
Want, fear, and famine's unresisted rage;
Here toils and death, and death's half-brother, Sleep,
Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep.

--AEneid: VI. 273-8

{48a} Merlin.--A bard or seer who is supposed to have flourished about
the middle of the fifth century, when Arthur was king. He figures
largely in early tales and traditions, and many of his prophecies are to
be found in later Cymric poetry, to one of which Tennyson refers in his
Morte d'Arthur:

I think that we
Shall never more, at any future time,
Delight our souls with talks of knightly deeds
Walking about the gardens and the halls
Of Camelot, as in the days that were.
I perish by this people which I made -
Though Merlin sware that I should come again
To rule once more--but let what will be, be.

{48b} Brutus, the son of Silvius.--According to the Chronicles of the
Welsh Kings, Brwth (Brutus) was the son of Selys (Silvius), the son of
Einion or AEneas who, tradition tells, was the first king of Prydain. In
these ancient chronicles we find many tales recorded of Brutus and his
renowned ancestors down to the fall of Troy and even earlier.

{48c} A huge, seething cauldron.--This was the mystical cauldron of
Ceridwen which Taliesin considered to be the source of poetic
inspiration. Three drops, he avers, of the seething decoction enabled
him to forsee all the secrets of the future.

{48d} Upon the face of earth.--These lines occur in a poem of Taliesin
where he gives an account of himself as existing in various places, and
contemporary with various events in the early eras of the world's
history--an echo of the teachings of Pythagoras:

Morte carent animae; semperque priore relicta
Sede, novis habitant domibus vivuntque receptae.

--Ovid: Metam. XV. 158-9.

{48e} Taliesin.--Taliesin is one of the earliest Welsh bards whose works
are still extant. He lived sometime in the sixth century, and was bard
of the courts of Urien and King Arthur.

{49a} Maelgwn Gwynedd.--He became lord over the whole of Wales about the
year 550 and regained much territory that had once been lost to the
Saxons. Indeed Geoffrey of Monmouth asserts that at one time Ireland,
Scotland, the Orkneys, Norway and Denmark acknowledged his supremacy.
Whatever truth there be in this assertion, it is quite certain that he
built a powerful navy whereby his name became a terror to the Vikings of
the North. In his reign, however, the country was ravaged by a more
direful enemy--the Yellow Plague; "whoever witnessed it, became doomed to
certain death. Maelgwn himself, through Taliesin's curse, saw the Vad
Velen through the keyhole in Rhos church and died in consequence." (Iolo
MSS.)

{49b} Arthur's quoit.--The name given to several cromlechau in Wales;
there is one so named, near the Bard's home, in the parish of Llanddwywe,
"having the print of a large hand, dexterously carved by man or nature,
on the side of it, as if sunk in from the weight of holding it." (v.
Camb. Register, 1795.)

{54a} In the Pope's favor.--Clement XI. became Pope in 1700, his
predecessor being Innocent XII.

{55a} Their hands to the bar.--Referring to the custom (now practically
obsolete) whereby a prisoner on his arraignment was required to lift up
his hands to the bar for the purpose of identification. Ellis Wynne was
evidently quite conversant with the practice of the courts, though there
is no proof of his ever having intended to enter the legal profession or
taken a degree in law as one author asserts. (v. Llyfryddiaeth y Cymry,
sub. tit. Ellis Wynne.)

{67a} "The Practice of Piety."--Its author was Dr. Bayley, Bishop of
Bangor; a Welsh translation by Rowland Vaughan, of Caergai, appeared in
1630, "printed at the signe of the Bear, in Saint Paul's Churchyard,
London."

{69a} At one time cold.--Cp.:

I come
To take you to the other shore across,
Into eternal darkness, there to dwell
In fierce heat and in ice.

- Dante: Inf. c. III. (Cary's trans.).

{71a} Above the roar.--Cp.:

The stormy blast of Hell
With restless fury drives the spirits on:
When they arrive before the ruinous sweep
There shrieks are heard, there lamentations, moans,
And blasphemies.

- Dante: Inf. c. V. (Cary's trans.).

{73a} Amidst eternal ice.--Cp.:

Thither . . . all the damned are brought
. . . and feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce!
From beds of raging fire to starve in ice
Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine
Immoveable, infix'd and frozen round
Periods of time; thence hurried back to fire.

- Par. Lost, II. 597-603.

{85a} Better to reign.--This speech of Lucifer is very Miltonic; compare
especially -

--in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell;
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

- Par. Lost, I. 261-3.

{85b} Revenge is sweet.--Cp.:

Revenge, at first though sweet
Bitter ere long, back on itself recoils.

- Par. Lost, IX. 171-2.

{87a} This enterprize.--Cp.:

--this enterprize
None shall partake with me.

- Par. Lost, II. 465.

{95a} Barristers.--The word cyfarthwyr, here rendered "barristers,"
really means "those who bark," which is probably only a pun of the Bard's
on cyfarchwyr--"those who address (the court)."

{95b} Sir Edmundbury Godfrey.--A London magistrate who took prominent
part against the Catholics in the reign of Charles II. At the time the
panic which the villainy of Titus Oates had fomented was at its height,
Sir Edmundbury was found dead on Primrose Hill, with his sword through
his body; his tragic end was attributed to the Papists, and many innocent
persons suffered torture and death for their supposed complicity in his
murder.

{102a} Einion the son of Gwalchmai.--This is a reference to a fable
entitled "Einion and the Lady of the Greenwood," where the bard is led
astray by "a graceful, slender lady of elegant growth and delicate
feature, her complexion surpassing every red and every white in early
dawn, the snow-flake on the mountain-side, and every beauteous colour in
the blossoms of wood, meadow, and hill." (v. Iolo MSS.) Einion was an
Anglesey bard, flourishing in the twelfth century.

{104a} Walking round the church.--Referring to a superstitious custom in
vogue in some parts of Wales as late as the beginning of the present
century. On All Souls' Night the women-folk gathered together at the
parish church, each with a candle in her hand; the sexton then came round
and lit the candies, and as these burnt brightly or fitfully, so would
the coming year prove prosperous or adverse. When the last candle died
out, they solemnly march round the church twice or thrice, then home in
silence, and in their dreams that night, their fated husbands would
appear to them.

{106a} Cerberus, et seq.--Compare the seven deadly sins in Langland's
Vision of Piers Plowman, Pride, Luxury (lecherie), Envy, Wrath,
Covetousness, Gluttony, and Sloth. See also Chaucer's Persones Tale,
passim. A description of these seven sins occurs very frequently in old
authors.

{107a} What brought you here.--Pride is the greatest of all the deadly
sins. Compare Spenser's Faery Queen I. c. IV, where "proud Lucifera, as
men did call her," was attended by "her six sage counsellors"--the other
sins. Shakespere names this sin Ambition:

Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition,
For by this sin fell the angels.

{108a} Sarah.--v. Apocrypha, the book of Tobit, c. VI.

{110a} If she and her scholars--Cp.:

At nos virtutes ipsas invertimus atque
sincerum cupimus vas incrustare. probus quis
nobiscum vivit multum demissus homo: illi
tardo cognomen pingui damus. his fugit omnes
insidias nullique malo latus obdit apertum pro bene sano
at non incauto fictum astutumque vocamus.

- Horace: Sat. I. iii.

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